Israel is at the forefront of high-tech weapons development, such as its "Iron Dome" missile defence system [EPA]
Nazareth, Israel - Israel's
secretive arms trade is booming as never before, according to the latest export figures. But it is also coming under mounting scrutiny as some
analysts argue that Israel has grown dependent on exploiting the
suffering of Palestinians for military and economic gain.
A new documentary, called The Lab, has led the way in turning the spotlight on Israel's arms industry. It
claims that four million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have
become little more than guinea pigs in military experiments designed to
enrich a new elite of arms dealers and former generals.
The film's release this month in the United States follows news that Israeli sales of weapons and military systems hit a record high last year of $7.5bn, up from $5.8bn the previous year. A decade ago, Israeli exports were worth less than $2bn.
Israel is now ranked as one of the world's largest arms
exporters - a considerable achievement for a country smaller than New
York.
Yotam Feldman, director of The Lab and a former journalist with Israel's Haaretz newspaper, says Israel has turned the occupied territories into a
laboratory for refining, testing and showcasing its weapons systems.
His argument is supported by other analysts who have examined Israel's military industries.
Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University,
said: "You only have to read the brochures published by the arms
industry in Israel. It's all in there. What they are selling is Israel's 'experience' and expertise gained from the occupation and its conflicts with its neighbours."

Inside Story - The shift in global arms trade
Another analyst, Jeff Halper, who is writing a book on Israel's role in the international homeland security industry, has gone further. He argues that Israel's success at selling its know-how to powerful
states means it has grown ever more averse to returning the occupied
territories to the Palestinians in a peace agreement.
"The occupied territiories are crucial as a laboratory not just in terms of Israel's internal security, but because they have allowed
Israel to become pivotal to the global homeland security industry.
"Other states need Israel's expertise, and that ensures its
place at the table with the big players. It gives Israel international
influence way out of keeping with its size. In turn, the hegemonic
states exert no real pressure on Israel to give up the occupied
territories because of their mutually reinforcing interests."
Suggestions that Israel is exploiting the occupied territories
for economic and military gain come at a sensitive moment for Israel, as it returns this week to long-stalled negotiations with the
Palestinians. The commitment of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu to the talks has already been widely questioned.
Booming arms sales

Israel's growing success at marketing its military wares to overseas buyers was highlighted in June when defence analysts Jane's ranked Israel in sixth place for arms exports, ahead of China and Italy, both major weapons producers.
However, Israel's own figures, which include additional covert
trade, place it in fourth place ahead of Britain and Germany, and
surpassed only by the United States, Russia and France.
Shemaya Avieli, the head of Sibat, the Israeli defence
ministry's agency promoting arms exports, said at a press conference
last month that the record figure had been a surprise given the "very
significant economic challenge" posed by the worldwide economic
downturn.
The arms-related trade is reported to account for somewhere between one-tenth and one-fifth of Israel's exports. The main buyers are Asian countries, especially India, Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and Latin America.
The importance of the arms trade to Israel can be gauged by a
simple mathematical calculation. Last year Israel earned nearly $1,000
from the arms trade per head of population - several times the per
capita income the US derives from military sales.
Israel's reliance on the arms industry was underscored in June
when a local court forced officials to publish data revealing that some 6,800 Israelis are actively engaged in exporting arms.
Separately, Ehud Barak, the defence minister in the previous
Israeli government, has revealed that 150,000 Israeli households - or
about one in 10 people in the country - depend economically on its
military industries.
These disclosures aside, Israel has been loath to lift the
shroud of secrecy that envelopes much of its arms trade. In recent court hearings it has argued that further revelations would harm "national
security and foreign relations".
'People like to buy things that have been tested'

Feldman's film - which won an award at DocAviv, Israel's
documentary Oscars - shows arms dealers, army commanders and government
ministers speaking frankly about the way the trade has become the engine of Israel's economic success during the global recession.
Leo Gleser, who specialises in developing new
weapons markets in Latin America, observes: "The [Israeli] defence
minister doesn't only deal with wars, he also makes sure the defence
industry is busy selling goods."
The Lab suggests that arms sales have been steadily
rising since 2002, when Israel reversed its withdrawals from Palestinian territory initiated by the Oslo accords. The Israeli army reinvaded the West Bank and Gaza in an operation known as Defensive Shield.
In parallel, many retired army officers moved into the new
high-tech field. There they found a chance to test their security ideas, including developing systems for long-term surveillance, control and
subjugation of "enemy" populations.
The biggest surge in the arms trade followed Operation Cast
Lead, Israel's month-long attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09 that provoked international condemnation. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed,
as well as 13 Israelis. Sales that year reached $6bn for the first time.
Benjamin Ben Eliezer, a former defence minister turned industry minister, attributes Israel's success to the fact that "people like to
buy things that have been tested. If Israel sells weapons, they have
been tested, tried out. We can say we've used this 10 years, 15 years."
Nonetheless, The Lab's argument has proved
controversial with some security experts. Shlomo Bron, a former air
force general who now works at the Institute for National Security
Studies at Tel Aviv University, rejected the film's premise.
"It may be true that in practice the military uses the occupied territories as a laboratory, but that is just an unfortunate effect of
our conflict with the Palestinians. And we sell to other countries only
because Israel itself is too small a market."
The film highlights the kind of innovations for which Israel
has been feted by overseas security services. It pioneered the airborne
drones that are now at the heart of the US programme of extra-judicial
executions in the Middle East.
Israel hopes to repeat that success with missile interception
systems such as Iron Dome, which was much on display when rockets were
fired out of Gaza during last year's Operation Pillar of Cloud.
Futuristic weapons

The Lab also underscores the Israeli arms industry's
success in developing futuristic weapons, such as the gun that shoots
around corners. The bullet-bending firearm caught Hollywood's attention, with Angelina Jolie wielding it - and effectively marketing it - in the 2008 film Wanted.
Halper believes that Israel has made itself useful to powerful
states not just in terms of developing weapons systems, but by becoming
particularly successful at what he terms "niche-filling".
"The United States, for example, knows better than anyone how
to attack other countries, as it did with Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel
can't teach it much on that score. But the US doesn't have much idea
what to do after the attack, how to pacify the population. That is where Israel steps in and offers its expertise."
This point is underscored in The Lab. Its unlikeliest
stars are former Israeli officers turned academics, whose theories have
helped to guide the Israeli army and hi-tech companies in developing new military techniques and strategies much sought-after by foreign
militaries.
Shimon Naveh, a military philosopher, is shown pacing through a mock Arab village that provided the canvas on which he devised a new
theory of urban warfare to deal with the second Palestinian intifada,
after it erupted in late 2000.

UN states fail to reach arms trade treaty
In the run-up to an attack in 2002 on Nablus' casbah, much
feared by the Israeli army for its labyrinthine layout, he suggested
that the soldiers move not through the alleyways, where they would be
easy targets, but unseen through the buildings, knocking holes through
the walls that separated the houses.
Naveh's idea became the key to crushing Palestinian armed
resistance, exposing the only places - in the heart of overcrowded
cities and refugee camps - where Palestinian fighters could still find
sanctuary from Israeli surveillance.
Another expert, Yitzhak Ben Israel, a former general who is now a professor at Tel Aviv University, helped to develop a mathematical
formula for the Israeli military that predicts the likely success of
assassination programmes to end organised resistance.
Ben Israel's calculus proved to the army that a Palestinian
cell planning an attack could be destroyed with high probability by
"neutralising" as few as one-fifth of its fighters.
This merging of theory, hardware and repeated "testing" in the
field has had armies, police forces and the homeland security industries lining up to buy Israeli know-how, Feldman argues. The lessons learned
in Gaza and the West Bank have also had applications in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
Yoav Galant, the head of the Israeli army's southern command
during Cast Lead, however, criticises the double standards of the
international community.
"While certain countries in Europe or Asia
condemned us for attacking civilians, they sent their officers here, and I briefed generals from 10 countries," he says. "There's a lot of
hypocrisy: they condemn you politically, while they ask you what your
trick is, you Israelis, for turning blood into money."
A spokesman for the Israeli defence ministry called the arguments made in The Lab "flawed and illogical".
"Our success in defence industries reflects the
fact that Israel has had to be resourceful and creative faced with an
existential threat for more than 60 years as well as a series of wars
with the Arab world."

Source:
Al Jazeera

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